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I came to know about LPI (Linux Professional Institute) almost 2 years back in Singapore. I was looking for a change and saw Linux Professional Institute LPIC-2 under preferred qualifications of Systems Engineer position at the career page of very well know multinational company. I was already RHCE (Red Hat Certified Engineer) at that time so became curious of the LPI as I never heard of LPI before and checked the exam objectives. I was very impressed the way LPI has covered the topics. There were at least 10 commands from LPIC-1 Exam-1 objectives that I was not aware of but mostly from Debian world. At that very moment I decided once my RHCE will expire I will purse LPI. I was excited and there were 2 things going on in my mind,

Last week I started Red Hat Server Hardening (RH413) online training from Network Nuts so thought of setting up my lab environment to exercise the quiz at the end of each unit. I decided to use the open source CentOS Linux and Oracle VirtualBox on my Dell Latitude Windows 7 laptop so it won't hurt my pocket with extra cost. As this is going to be a lab environment and we experiment and break things up so it is a good practice to have a baseline image of the operating system which we can use to create multiple identical virtual machines within few minutes when needed using Clone feature. VirtualBox also has another great feature and that is point in time snapshot. Let's check out the step by step process to build the lab environment,

In this post I am gonna provide you the steps to collect the debug logs that should be provided while reporting an authentication failure issue with Centrify DirectControl. If you have the paid version then you can simply send an email to support@centrify.com with the logs files otherwise Centrify Forum is the one great stop shop for you. Make sure you run these steps before fixing the issue like restarting the system or restarting the centrifydc service.These steps are for RHEL (Red Hat Enterprise Linux) users but other distributions should have similar steps just the directory structure might change a little bit,

Today I got a request to disable insecure SNMP v1 / v2c from a list of IP addresses. If you are still using SNMP v1 / v2c then it's really the time to disable the version and configure secured SNMP v3. Sometime ago I wrote a post on how to install and configure Net-SNMP v3 in Red Hat Enterprise Linux 4, you might wanna check that out as well. So, I had no idea what these servers are because I like to memorize my servers with their host name. And I didn't want to run nslookup or host or dig one by one on each IP. Also, I wanted to check whether these IP are alive / ping-able on my network or not. I could have used for loop and made one complicated command but for couple of reasons I chose not to do that,

These messages are getting logged because your computer's samAccountName (in layman's terms hostname) is greater than 15 characters long on DirectControl 5.0.x. This has been fixed in 5.1.0 and in current latest version that is 5.1.2 at the time of writing this blog post.

It was the first day of my VMware vSphere: Design Workshop class and I was quite excited to learn the designing stuff, kind of my second step after VCP (VMware Certified Professionals) towards the vSphere Architect role. The class was taught by Patrick Fong trainer from www.ivtsys.com at VMware Singapore and I find him straight forward and nice guy. It’s a slides based training class and one of the good things about that is it covers most of the topics and details, big or small, that are necessary from the VMware’s perspective but it leaves less time to discuss the real life designs and the experiences. I want to see more production designs to talk about and little less theory as VMware has done a great job on white papers, documentation and knowledge base.

Most enterprises have central monitoring system which is used to monitor pretty much every system/network gear in the infrastructure. In this post we will configure secure user based Net-SNMP v3Agent on VMware ESX 4.0 so these hosts can also be monitored from the same central monitoring system in a secured manner. If you want to install and configured Net-SNMP v3 on RHEL4 systems then check out my other post. You need to perform these steps as root user so login to ESX 4.0 console as root now.